A University of Hawaiʻi medical program that targets the state’s physician shortage welcomed its fifth cohort of students last month. This was just weeks after celebrating its first graduating class in June, sending them off to their residency programs across the country before they eventually come home to serve the Garden Isle.
Through the Kauaʻi Medical Training Track at the UH John A. Burns School of Medicine, students get their tuition, housing and transportation costs covered, and in exchange, they serve Kauaʻi for at least four years as a physician.
While a commitment like that can be daunting to some, many students enrolled in the KMTT program are from Hawaiʻi and feel that they can give back to the community that raised them, including second-year student Thomas Gausepohl.
“Especially in medicine, I feel like the whole goal is to serve, and being a doctor (is) one of the best and most rewarding ways to do that,” Gausepohl said. “For me, it’s just getting to come back home, so it was an immediate yes.”
The program, which launched in 2022, was designed to address the continuous physician shortage across the state. There are roughly 3,600 physicians currently providing patient care across Hawaiʻi, but not all are full time, which puts the number of Full-Time Equivalents at just over 3,000.
According to UH, this means there is a shortage of 833 FTEs statewide — up from the previous year’s 768.
Dr. Travis Hong, the Director of Rural Health at JABSOM, said the shortage is felt deeply in Hawaiʻi's more rural settings, including Kauaʻi.
“This is going to be a huge impact for future healthcare because there are very few places that are guaranteed to have 30-plus physicians coming back in the next five to 10 years,” Hong said.
The first two years of the program are filled with lectures, labs, and opportunities to gain clinical experience, while the last two years are a full immersion into Kauaʻi communities. Each cohort of students live on the island while they rotate through specialties, learn from Kauaʻi professionals and participate in community outreach.
Fourth-year KMTT student Dylan Lawton said this allows him and his colleagues to be fully immersed in the community, which leads to better care.
“Being in the community, you find out what it needs, and you can treat those patients better,” Lawton said. “It’s important to know about things like food insecurity in certain parts of the island, or the very high geriatric population, or what are the main modes of transportation that people use? You can treat patients a lot better if you know this information.”
Lawton noted that the KMTT cohorts are the only learners on the Garden Isle, meaning there are no other students or non-professional physicians rotating through the medical facilities. He said this means the knowledge and wisdom passed down from his mentors are invaluable.
Hong said the success of this program is a good sign that a similar model could work on other islands in the future. Due to the number of facilities and available physicians, Maui or Hawaiʻi Island would be the most probable.
